That part of the year has come when people spent a lot of money shopping for discounted items and products. With mouth watering offers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and Boxing day, consumers see themselves spending millions in their hundreds on online shopping platforms.
This period also presents a perfect opportunity for hackers to leverage popular brands and unsafe consumer shopping habits.
According to a report from cyber security firm RiskIQ, threat actors will target customers during this holiday shopping period by impersonating top e-commerce sites, aided with online unsafe consumers habits.
The San Francisco based company who monitors advertising networks for malware, spyware and as well provides mobile app security services, noted that the top 10 most trafficked sites over Thanksgiving weekend had a combined total of 6,353 blacklisted apps that were impersonating them.
A survey carried out by the security firm showed 72% of respondent say that they would download a shopping-related app if it offered a substantial discount.
Over 58% of the respondent said they don't bother to check the developer of the shopping app before downloading, while 77% say they don't mind making purchase from a retailer that they never shopped with.....as long as they were offered a good discount.
Whats alarming is that almost a third of the respondents say they are vigilante partially, or not vigilante at all when entering payment information online.
The report says it detected over 65 incidents of domain infringement across the top 10 most trafficked e-tailers on Black Friday weekend. Adding to it, there were over 11,000 new hostnames and as well over 180,000 blacklisted URLs that contained terms like Black Friday, Boxing Day, Cyber Monday and Christmas.
RiskIQ threat researcher, Jordan Herman notes that bad actors will use names of top e-commerce sites to "fool shoppers looking for Black Friday deals, sales, and coupons by creaking fake mobile apps and landing pages."